Forums → WEPR → Science without philosophy is lame, philosophy without science is blind

The point that I suspect @Ishtaron has missed is that faith is different to theorisation. Faith is not contingent upon reason or justification. Theorisation is. We theorise that all things have rational explanations, because, thus far, we have failed to find anything that definitely doesn't. If we find something that can't be explained rationally, and our failure to understand can't be chalked up to lack of contextual knowledge, the theory will change. The maxim "Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth" is an important part of the scientific method.

because you show a complete lack of understanding regarding our current knowledge and the scientific methods and organisms.

No, I really don't. I'm simply far more critical of science than most people. There are numerous modern theories that I find to be, at the very least, lacking crucial pieces to truly be valid. I spend a lot of time on the internet dealing with people who don't know the difference between a theory and a law, or even what the base requirements of a theory are. Debating with people who quote Richard Dawkins claiming evolution is a fact without understanding the first thing about the difference between natural selection as described by Darwin and full scale macroevolution. If you can actually prove something I said wrong feel free to go for it. I did not bring up those examples lightly, I've been in plenty of debates and can easily defend my position on those subjects with logic.

This is confirmed by pretty much everything science has found out to date. That everything can be found out by science is a most reasonable and broadly supported assumption. However, claiming that there are things which science cannot describe; claiming that there are supernatural phenomena; this is an unsupported claim and definitely a belief.

Is it confirmed? Just about every doctor in the world has at some point, or will if they're just starting their career, encountered something that they can only describe as a miracle. Despite all of our knowledge of how the human body works and all of our machines to study what's going on inside of us there are still instances of something that simply cannot be explained. I'm living proof of this actually. Every time I meet a new doctor the first thing they do is listen to my lungs and marvel at the fact that there is no indication of anything wrong despite the permanent damage caused by drowning in my own bodily fluids for over a decade. There isn't a doctor on the planet that can tell you why the damage is undetectable to exterior observation because according to everything we know about the human body that shouldn't be true.

Or perhaps you'd like to discuss something a little more general. Human consciousness is still an unexplainable phenomena. We can study the various components of our minds and even see them in action with an fMRI. We've spent centuries poking and prodding at brains, living and dead, trying to figure out how exactly it is we work but no mechanism has ever been found to provide sentience. The exact method by which our mind functions is still more mystery than knowledge. We understand the chemicals involved, we can mimic our brains' use of electrical signals with computers, we know every nook and cranny of the physical matter of our brains. But, despite all of that knowledge and all of that study, conscious thought is still a complete mystery to us.

There are a great many things directly around us that we still don't understand. A great many mysteries that have never been solved. Numerous instances that defy what our knowledge tells us is supposed to be possible. And we are but one miniscule speck of dust in a vast and largely unknown universe. What we know, what we've found through science and logic, only makes up the smallest fraction of all the knowledge in the universe.

That is the quote Mage has formulated in the OP and which I have already responded positively to.

Actually it is the reverse of the quote in the OP. Mage simply removed religion because he didn't believe it belonged with science and replaced it with philosophy. Mine indicates the actual relationship between science and philosophy but has nothing to do with Einstein's original statement or intentions.

a ridiculous farce as compared to the actual rigorous scientific method.

I find a great deal of modern "science" to be a farce of the actual rigorous scientific method. Too many assumptions. Too many untestable "theories". Too many people replacing actual evidence with their own beliefs of how things should be.

Faith is not contingent upon reason or justification.

When did I say it is? The point I think all of you are missing is the point of Einstein's statement, which is the purpose of this thread. Everything else has mostly just been me providing evidence to challenge you into thinking critically about scientific concepts many of you seem to accept as absolute so that you can see the core of my argument.

Einstein was talking about the relationship between science and religion. Without science religion is directionless. A collection of ideals and beliefs with no way to act upon them. No way to understand the world around us. Without religion science develops slowly. Without faith in what they're doing, without a purpose to exist, there's little reason to seek the truth. The two are capable of existing without the other but neither is as strong alone as it is when working with the other. This, however, is not true of science and philosophy. While philosophy is broad enough to exist without science, philosophical inquiry is the beginning of scientific pursuit. Thus, without philosophy science is blinded to any purpose and trapped in a state of stagnation while philosophy is weakened without science but not completely incapacitated.

The curiosity that drives humans scientific discovery is natural; that is, we have a predilection to find out how things work and feel unfulfilled without answers once we begin to search for them. That could be seen as faith in the existence of an answer by some, but I see it as a biochemical construct that coerces humans to increase their potential for survival or life satisfaction by increasing the sum of their knowledge.

Science cannot exist without philosophy, because science is philosophy applied to the empirical, just as philosophy is maths applied to non-abstract concepts; that is, things that have a meaning.

No, I really don't.

Actually it is the reverse of the quote in the OP. Mage simply removed religion because he didn't believe it belonged with science and replaced it with philosophy. Mine indicates the actual relationship between science and philosophy but has nothing to do with Einstein's original statement or intentions.

@Ishtaron If you would like to get past HahiHa's slightly over harsh appraisal of your abilities as a scientist, would you kindly tell me why natural selection is different to macroevolution? Not completely on topic, but since the common consensus is that the only difference between them is a million years, I'd like to know the process by which you reach a conclusion, which is more on topic.

@09philj Natural selection and macroevolution are only the same thing in Darwin's The Origin of Species. While Darwin's observations provided some insight into the aspects of inherited traits, research in the area didn't really take off until after Mendel's pea garden experiment. Natural selection is a very general term that encompasses every way a shift in allele frequencies can occur. The most common is simple predation but there's also more extreme events like the bottle neck effect, the founder effect, etc etc. None of these things, however, creates or removes genes completely from the population. Without a mutation adding or altering the populations gene pool the population remains the same species and a new form of natural selection can cause the allele frequency to shift back resulting the the former phenotype returning.

Genetics are a key part to understanding taxonomy. For a fairly solid line on what is and is not part of the same species, genetics is the most useful tool. If any two creatures are genetically similar enough that they can mate and produce a viable offspring they're both part of the same species. For example, a lion and a tiger can mate to produce a liger however a group of ligers cannot mate with each other to produce more offspring because they're sterile. Dogs on the other hand (which evolutionists love to point to as evidence of Darwinian evolution) can not only mate with each other to produce viable offspring, but can also mate with wolves and produce viable offspring. Given enough time without human interference dog breeds could even intermix enough to return to their natural wolf genotype, they wouldn't even need to interbreed with wolves to do it.

Humans are also a good example of this. Spread out across various continents with extreme variances in weather different populations of people developed different phenotypes. Our environments shaped how we look, how we act, and even caused our bodies to produce chemicals in different ratios. Yet all humans regardless of appearance or skin color are not only part of the same species but the same subspecies (homo sapiens sapiens aka the doubly wise hominid, hubris thy name is man) regardless of their races' initial habitat. Without mutations changing the genetic make-up of a population there's simply no physical way for that population to change species.

I have put down a few links in the Evolution thread that will be of interest to the both of you, and relate to various points on evolution addressed in this thread.

To clarify some terms.

Conjecture is an explanatio based on observation.
Theories are explanations based on surrogate results from experiments or reasoning.
Facts are things we can directly observe or prove.
Laws are descriptions of the method by which something occurs.

You are underestimating the frequency of the occurence of mutation. It happens much more regularly than you might think. You are also not comprehending the timescale which we're dealing with here. Lets take the example of humans again. The original homo sapiens living in africa would have had characteristics consistent with a higher rate of survival to breed in that environment. When humans left africa for Europe, America, and Asia, and became sperated from their peers, small mutations that would allow some individuals to perform better in their environment were passed on to more surviving offspring than was normal. This happened generation after generation, over a timescale we can barely comprehend (certainly over 100,000 years), until the different groups possessed the distinct traits they show today. However, 100,000 years is almost nothing in the grand scheme of things. Had humans remained seperated for, say, a few million years, that might produce different species, although that's unlikely, since humans change relatively little from generation to generation, as our genes are fairly stable.

Now, if we extrapolate back from that, we can theorise that mutation and natural selection connect every species on the planet to the earliest known life 640 million years ago, which we can link with similar characteristics (Birds to dinosaurs to early reptiles and so on) However, this is only the life we have evidence for. Given the estimated time it has taken for life to evolve from the earliest life to us, the time at which we think bacteria first emerged was 3.8 billion years ago. The Miller-Urey experiment suggests that the early oceans, when struck by lightning, reacted with the atmosphere to produce amino acids, fatty acids, sugars, and other building blocks of life. With this happening hundreds of times a day around the world, it's possible, even probable, that basic life would appear. Since this explanation has some evidence and obeys the other laws we know of how the world works, it is pursued as the most likely explanation, unless somebody produces evidence to the contrary, at which point we will backtrack to find where we went wrong.

Holes in a theory are not necessarily flaws. They may merely be spaces that our knowledge doesn't yet fill.

Without mutations changing the genetic make-up of a population there's simply no physical way for that population to change species.

Microevolutionary processes are sufficient to explain speciation. There is a debate about whether other processes, and which, must be involved in larger evolutionary changes, like tetrapod evolution; though there is no doubt that those changes happened and are possible.

You are underestimating the frequency of the occurence of mutation. It happens much more regularly than you might think.

Now, if we extrapolate back from that, we can theorise that mutation and natural selection connect every species on the planet to the earliest known life 640 million years ago, which we can link with similar characteristics (Birds to dinosaurs to early reptiles and so on) However, this is only the life we have evidence for. Given the estimated time it has taken for life to evolve from the earliest life to us, the time at which we think bacteria first emerged was 3.8 billion years ago. The Miller-Urey experiment suggests that the early oceans, when struck by lightning, reacted with the atmosphere to produce amino acids, fatty acids, sugars, and other building blocks of life.

I feel as though the conversation has been derailed. There are specific threads in which to talk about the viability of evolutionary theory. In any case, whether evolutionary theory is true has nothing at all to do with the OP.

I had presented (what I hope was) a pretty compelling case for for the first half of the OP's claim - that science without philosophy is lame. I'd like to hear some thoughts on whether the argument I gave there works. But I'm especially curious about the second half of the OP's claim. Is philosophy without science blind? Granted, my area of research does get moved around and informed by science. But this is simply a matter of fact. It doesn't speak to the wider claim that, without science, philosophy is blind. My intuition is that this claim is false, although something in the neighbourhood is definitely true.

Science is empirical philosophy. So without science, philosophy is just about the non-empirical. Nothing wrong with that, but having science helps.

Philosophy is not actually blind without science; however, if not for scientific advances, our knowledge might still be at the level of the great ancient Greek philosophers. So you might say that philosophy without science is lame.

As a final point, some people hold that philosophers are good at asking questions, but not so good at providing answers. This is something that is just patently false, so statements like this make me a little grumpy.

I was actually unaware of this, could you provide an example?

Philosophy is not actually blind without science; however, if not for scientific advances, our knowledge might still be at the level of the great ancient Greek philosophers. So you might say that philosophy without science is lame.

So you think it perhaps might be better to say "Philosophy without science is lame, science without philosophy is blind"?

So you think it perhaps might be better to say "Philosophy without science is lame, science without philosophy is blind"?

MageGrayWolf: So you think it perhaps might be better to say "Philosophy without science is lame, science without philosophy is blind"?

HahiHa: Yes, it seems to reflect the relationship between science and philosophy more accurately.

I could swear I've seen something like this once already. Oh right, here on page 2.

Ishtaron: Science without philosophy is blind, philosophy without science is lame.

HahiHa: To be honest, I think both ways are correct.